Monday’s announcement that Fox, Panasonic and Samsung will form a licensable certification and logo program built around Samsung’s HDR10+ dynamic-metadata high dynamic range platform (see 1708280018) was “definitely an attempt to give the industry an option for an open standard that could be further developed and one that’s royalty-free.” So said Danny Kaye, Fox Film Corp. executive vice president, when we asked him after Panasonic’s IFA news conference in Berlin Wednesday whether the HDR10+ licensing program was meant to give the industry an alternative to the proprietary, royalty-bearing Dolby Vision offering. Fox, Panasonic and Samsung will seek wide deployment of the HDR10+ licensing program once license terms are announced publicly at CES, Kaye told us. “We hope everybody adopts it,” he said. “That’s the intent of something like this with an open standard, to get as many device manufacturers, chip manufacturers, content providers, as possible, and that’s what we’ll try to attain.” The “ease of authoring” content with HDR10+ will lead to many more HDR films “becoming available” than previously thought, said Michiko Ogawa, who runs Panasonic's home entertainment business.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a lower court's 2016 preliminary injunction against online streaming service VidAngel (see 1708240017) was unsurprising, but the unequivocal decision should be welcomed by many copyright owners, Copyright Alliance Vice President-Legal Policy Terry Hart blogged Monday. The 9th Circuit ruling might not be the end of the litigation, since VidAngel retained "high-powered" attorney David Quinto and has been active on Capitol Hill, Hart said. He said VidAngel likely will file for en banc review by the 9th Circuit and then petition the Supreme Court unless it reaches a settlement agreement with studios. VidAngel didn't comment.
LG is “substantially” underpaying the royalties it owes on Advanced Audio Coding product shipments since signing a January 2009 patent licensing agreement to use the audio-compression technology, and has thwarted auditors from examining its “books and records,” alleged Via Licensing (in Pacer) Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland. Via runs the AAC patent pool for parent Dolby Labs and Ericsson, Microsoft, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic and others. LG “breached its obligations to cooperate, and refused to allow a full and fair audit of its sales” under the license agreement, it said. LG didn’t comment Friday. The license sets a “standard” royalty fee structure that starts at 98 cents a unit for the first 500,000 AAC devices shipped in any country globally, and scales down to 10 cents a unit for device quantities of 75 million units or more.
Samsung withdrew its European application to register “HDR10" as a trademark Aug. 16, weeks after the EU Intellectual Property Office, acting on opposition from LG Electronics, ruled the application “not eligible,” according to documents on EUIPO’s website (login required). Months earlier, Samsung abandoned an attempt (see 1703150031) to register HDR10 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Samsung declined to comment Thursday. After late-March publication of the application, EUIPO received “third party observations” from LG that “give rise to serious doubts concerning the eligibility of the trade mark for registration and therefore the Office decided to re-examine the application,” the agency told Samsung in an Aug. 1 letter.
Digital Media Licensing Association joined the Copyright Alliance, the alliance announced Wednesday. Established in 1951, DMLA supports copyright protections 100-plus members who own, manage and license visual content.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer should ensure IP rights of Americans are "afforded, protected and enforced at the highest levels" when renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, said House IP Subcommittee Vice Chairman Doug Collins, R-Ga., and Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., in a Tuesday letter to him. They urged Lighthizer to promote strong copyright protection standards similar to those in the U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement, keep the U.S.'s long-standing stance on copyright exceptions language without open-ended balance provisions, and advance "responsible" internet partnership between platforms without outdated safe harbor provisions. They said Canada adopted "sweeping" copyright exceptions with a weak safe harbor system, and Mexico has high piracy rates and enforcement problems. Foreign countries have enacted laws "that harm the market for American works. NAFTA should not exacerbate this problem, but, rather, be the first step in correcting it," they wrote. The letter said copyright-intensive industries contributed $1.2 trillion and supplied 5.6 million jobs in 2015 to the U.S. economy.
Broadcom’s Tariff Act Section 337 allegations at the International Trade Commission (see 1708160055) seek to name DTS as a “component functionality respondent" because its Play-Fi technology violates a Broadcom patent that “involves extraordinarily valuable technology in the field of audio processing for wireless systems,” Broadcom said in an amended complaint (login required). That Definitive Technology, MartinLogan, McIntosh Lab, Paradigm, Phorus, Polk Audio and Wren Sound Systems build Play-Fi functionality into their products under license from DTS qualifies them as “downstream” respondents, said the complaint. Representatives of those companies didn’t comment Friday. LG, Samsung and Sony are lawful licensees of the Broadcom patent, Broadcom said.
The government is wrong in its interpretation that a longstanding antitrust consent decree bars BMI from granting fractional licenses to perform songs, the organization told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a brief filed last week. The filling was in response to BMI's yearlong legal fight with DOJ, which is appealing a lower court ruling that sided with BMI and said the decree's language doesn't prohibit such licensing (see 1705120040). DOJ, which filed an opening brief in May, favors 100 percent licensing, and supported by technology companies, broadcasters and others (see 1705260049). BMI said prohibiting fractional licensing could harm the market, which could become less competitive. It cited the Supreme Court's 1971 decision in U.S. v. Armour, which said a party to a consent decree can't engage in any activity "expressly and unambiguously prohibited" in the decree unless it falls outside that scope and then it isn't regulated. BMI said its consent decree "says nothing about fractional licensing." It said the government's stance is based on a "logical fallacy" and wants the court to "find an implied prohibition against fractional licensing." BMI posited a decree that required a pizzeria to sell pizzas to all customers without specifying whether the establishment "may only sell pizzas." The decree doesn't expressly address selling slices, so BMI said the pizzeria can sell both slices and whole pies. BMI said fractional licenses either are included in its repertory and therefore it can sell them or, they're excluded from the repertory and not regulated by the decree. "Either way, BMI is free to license such fractional interests and is certainly not prohibited from doing so," it added.
The Copyright Royalty Board is seeking comment by Sept. 14 on whether stakeholders object to a requested partial distribution of the 2015 Digital Audio Recording Technology Sound Recordings Fund royalties to the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (AARC) and to claimants that reached settlement with the alliance, said a CRB notice in Tuesday's Federal Register. The board said AARC requested a partial distribution of 98 percent from both the Copyright Owners and Feature Recording Artists subfunds. AARC said it reached settlement with all but a few.
The American Association of Law Libraries joined the two-year-old trade group Re:Create, which advocates for "balanced" copyright rules, said an AALL Thursday news release. Other members include the American Library Association, Center for Democracy & Technology, Computer and Communications Industry Association, CTA, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge and the R Street Institute.